Gov. Abigail Spanberger recently signed off on a measure that will require Virginia's public colleges and universities to ask students whether they're also parents — joining a handful of states that have similar mandates.
Students won't be required to tell colleges they're parents. They will instead have the option to self-report the information, with the idea that it can help colleges better serve them.
Del. Destiny LeVere Bolling (D–Henrico) introduced the legislation, saying parenting students are often "falling through the cracks when it comes to higher education."
She said they may not be getting the resources they need from colleges to help them complete their studies, and said colleges should be asking questions like: Is our health hub supporting them? Are we staying open long enough? Do we have enough counselors on staff who can relate to them when they're trying to get their course loads set up for the semester?
LeVere Bolling has been contemplating going back to school to pursue an advanced degree. But as a new mom with many additional responsibilities, flexibility will be a key factor in helping her decide which school and program to choose. And she said colleges should be thinking seriously about flexibility for other parenting students, too.
"I'm looking for hybrid or remote," she said.
She said being a first-generation college student was hard enough: juggling classes, multiple jobs to help contribute to her household and more. When her daughter was born last year, she remembers thinking to herself: "I could not imagine having a child, balancing all that I had to balance and still trying to achieve the dream of needing to get a degree."
National surveys show 1 in 5 college students across the country are also parents. Women and people of color are also more likely to be parenting students.
"This is not a niche population," said Tom Allison with HCM Strategists, who advocated for the bill. "This is a relatively significant population with unique challenges and opportunities for the commonwealth to better serve them."
Allison said there's been growing momentum from think tanks nationwide to push for better data collection on parenting students — especially in light of recent changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid that have made it more difficult for colleges to identify parenting students using the FAFSA form.
Katrina Bailey, who also worked with HCM on the legislation, works with parenting students at Brightpoint Community College. She said she used to be able to use the FAFSA responses to determine which students had dependents under the age of 18 and do targeted outreach to them about additional resources.
Now, she can only see if a student has listed dependents, but not the age of their dependents. So, there's no way to distinguish whether the student has much older children or elderly parents they're taking care of, for example.
Also, not all students who fill out the form are even asked whether or not they have dependents.
"The FAFSA form is not a reliable data system for us," Bailey told lawmakers in January. "It also can feel intrusive for parenting students to receive an email based on data they know they've submitted, but may not have known would be used in this manner."
She hopes the legislation will lead to more reliable data collection to inform support systems and programming for parenting students on community college campuses and beyond.
Crystal Cempron, a mother of two and Brightpoint student, told lawmakers in January she's graduating this fall with support from the CAPS program — which is specifically designed to support parenting students on campus.
She said having more accurate data will help colleges better understand how to serve students like herself, who remain invisible on many college campuses now.
"Visibility is the first step to support, and support is how we move student parents from invisible to successful," she said.
Colleges will have some flexibility to decide how they collect the data: by amending their application forms or sending out a survey, for example.
Data reporting will eventually be standardized and sent to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. But Tod Massa, SCHEV's policy analytics director, told VPM News it will probably take two or three years before the collection is integrated into their data system and reported out.
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